Background

Renewing car insurance isn’t a top priority amongst consumers in Singapore. In fact, our research uncovered that approximately 50% of Singaporean drivers auto-renew their policies with the insurer they first signed up with, out of convenience, laziness, and pressure to get it done quickly. Not to mention pushy agents hounding them too. The habit of auto-renewing often results in consumers paying higher car insurance premiums than they need to. Our car insurance policy meta-analysis over the course of a year indicated that most drivers in Singapore could save up to $620 when they compare car insurance across the market. MoneySmart wanted to drive a change in legacy consumer behaviour by bringing car insurance behaviours online and help consumers save money. From here, our first brand campaign was born – it places an informative, relatable and humorous narrative at the heart of the campaign.

Describe the creative idea

Our campaign narrative deliberately over-dramatised the client-agent relationship to further drive our message - “Feeling Pressured to Auto-Renew Car Insurance? Save up to $620 when you compare online with Moneysmart”. The campaign centred around a typical Singaporean driver, Chris, whom like many drivers, faces the pressure of auto-renewing his policy every year. The Hero Video introduces a happy-looking Chris. As the view widens, it reveals the gradual descent of Chris’s sanity as more agents appear, hell bent on asking him to auto-renew his policy which sounded like incomprehensible jargon to Chris. The composed soundtrack, emphasises on the gibberish except for the hook “Sign here, sign here, sign here”, which are really the only words one actually understands. The narrative further extends across static ad placements and OOH bus, trucks and taxi ads that depict scenes of an overwhelmed Chris being chased by a mob of pushy agents.

Describe the strategy

Targeting car owners in Singapore in need of renewing car insurance after their first year of ownership, we understood our consumers’ video consumption habits and first kicked off an online targeted video ad on Youtube, Facebook and Instagram where audiences are introduced to our Hero Video as well as 15s / 6s cutdowns to grab fleeting eyeballs. This narrative continues on the robust and expansive media plan involving out-of-home media buys to target our audiences offline - the car owners on the roads of Singapore. Bus, truck and taxi wraps hit the roads showing audiences the ensuing “chase scene” where agents are pursuing Chris by any means possible. The strategy rounds off with tactical direct response components powered by a proprietary DMP, giving us powerful 1st party data for the creation of targeted segments and look alike audiences across distribution channels.

Describe the execution

Given that car insurance renewal happens once a year, we strategically spread our campaign across 12-weeks to maximise campaign air-time and reach, through a multi-channel and multi-format approach both online and offline. Our paid media strategy included YouTube, Facebook and Instagram across 40s, 15s and 6s formats, optimized towards delivering reach effectively, reinforcing our value proposition with a strong call to action optimised towards conversions. We wrapped 100 taxis, 44 buses, 3 Optimax trucks in a convoy format for our Out of Home phase. These moving billboards covering the entire country, but focusing on high traffic density areas in the CBD and Orchard road areas. We rounded off with retargeting audiences in a Direct Response (DR) plan aimed at engaged audience groups driven by 1st party data. This was powered by our proprietary Data Management Platform, driving consumer action at low cost - reducing CPAs as much as 30%.

List the results

Our 40s Hero Video garnered an impressive 48% view-through rate (VTR) on YouTube. We saw an increase in overall brand awareness from 51.9 pts to 58.1 pts and consideration from 17.5 pts to 22.2 pts by leveraging YouGov’s BrandIndex, we were able to make remarkable impact across key brand metrics. As a result, brand consideration increased by 27% and brand awareness by 12%. We also drove demand and increase sessions on MoneySmart’s car insurance page as we saw 3x the volume of Moneysmart branded Car Insurance keywords on Google Search indicating strong demand resulting in 4x more traffic on our Car Insurance page, increasing Moneysmart keyword volumes by 18% on Google Search. Most importantly, the number of consumers comparing on Moneysmart’s Car Insurance page doubled, resulting in over 10,000 car insurance comparisons that could have saved drivers up to $6,000,000 combined!